In the sixth major emoji update since 2014, much of the low hanging fruit has been addressed prior to this release. Skin tone support was added to the Unicode Standard in 2015, increased representation of women in 2016, gender inclusive people in 2017 and hair color additions in 2018.[1]

2019 expands the scope of people that can be represented, including people with various disabilities (proposed by Apple last year), a gender inclusive couple, as well emojis which permit a mix of skin tones for people holding hands.

Emoji 12.0 is comprised of 59 distinct new emojis; 75 when gender variations are taken into account; and 230 new emojis when all skin tone options are also included.

Unicode's announcement today indicates that all the documentation required for vendors implement the new emoji set is now complete. Links to relevant data files, technical documentation and updated charts are all linked within Unicode's post, and will be used by developers to add emoji support to operating systems, apps, and web platforms throughout 2019.

Technically none of these are necessarily in a romantic relationship, as the official designation is merely “people holding hands”. As with any emoji, the meaning comes down to context.

Mixed Skin Tones

One of the most frequent requests sent to Emojipedia is about the lack of an emoji or emojis to represent black families. Emoji 12.0 doesn't deliver any changes to the set of family emojis, but does for the first time, list options for all variations of people holding hands.

Unicode doesn't preclude vendors from supporting skin tones on families, but the list of RGI (Recommended for General Interchange) emojis in Emoji 12.0 focuses on the 70 additions required to allow these couples to have a mix of skin tones.

Colors

Until now, the mix of colors available for squares, circles and hearts has varied for historical reasons.

Most of the original shapes were added to the Unicode Standard for compatibility reasons; and a number of hearts have since been added (🖤 Black Heart in 2016 and 🧡 Orange Heart in 2017 (to complete the rainbow of hearts).

With Emoji 12.0, every shape (squares, circles and hearts) will have the choice of the following colors:

🔴 Red

🧡 Orange

💛 Yellow

💚 Green

🔵 Blue

💜 Purple

⬜️ White

⬛️ Black

📦 Brown

Hearts already cover most of these colors leaving only White Heart and Brown Heart to be added. White Heart remains one of Emojipedia's most popular requests, with many people using the non-emoji character ♡ White Heart Suit in its place.

Release

Changes to Emoji 12.0 since the last draft in October 2018 include some emoji names (One-Piece has been renamed One-Piece Swimsuit), removal of some emoji skin tone support (the last draft showed one family supporting a shared skin tone - but not the other 19 families), and the addition of the gender inclusive pair holding hands (previous versions only included women and men).

Unicode announced the publishing of Emoji 12.0 data files on 2019-02-05 (California / US Pacific Time), and noted that the announcement is ahead of the Unicode 12.0 release to give vendors time to work on their color emoji designs.

Expect to see these on most major operating systems in the second half of 2019. Generally speaking, these tend to come to Android in beta around August, and to iOS in October or November.

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Disclaimer: I am a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, and represent Emojipedia at Unicode Technical Committee meetings. ↩︎

As emojis appear differently on each platform, there is no one “true” design for any given character, and our images provide one potential interpretation of today's new additions. Sometimes a few of our sample images have been known to cause a stir. ↩︎

These aren't the first gender inclusive emojis though. In 2017, emojis were added to for Child, Adult, and Older Adult as alternatives to the Girl/Boy, Woman/Man, Older Woman/Older Man emojis. There's also the matter than a number emojis don't specify a gender, but generally still get a gendered appearance. Eg: 🤦 Person Facepalming (and many others). ↩︎